February 2023 – Page 79 – news.buyenne.com

This week’s Reddit breach shows company’s security is (still) woefully inadequate

This week’s intrusion into Reddit’s network didn’t have to happen, but it did.

Popular discussion website Reddit proved this week that its security still isn’t up to snuff when it disclosed yet another security breach that was the result of an attack that successfully phished an employee’s login credentials.

In a post published Thursday, Reddit Chief Technical Officer Chris "KeyserSosa" Slowe said that after the breach of the employee account, the attacker accessed source code, internal documents, internal dashboards, business systems, and contact details for hundreds of Reddit employees. An investigation into the breach over the past few days, Slowe said, hasn’t turned up any evidence that the company’s primary production systems or that user password data was accessed.

“On late (PST) February 5, 2023, we became aware of a sophisticated phishing campaign that targeted Reddit employees,” Slowe wrote. “As in most phishing campaigns, the attacker sent out plausible-sounding prompts pointing employees to a website that cloned the behavior of our intranet gateway, in an attempt to steal credentials and second-factor tokens.”

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

System Shock remake demo fuses modern design to a retro FPS/RPG package

This new version should whet the appetites of immersive sim fans, old and new.

A humanoid mutant approaching the player in a dark corridor in System Shock.

Nobody was expecting to see a PC demo for the System Shock remake this week, least of all me. I've been waiting to revisit Citadel Station and its malevolent AI since the project's announcement nearly seven years ago. Having spent a couple hours in the first level, I'm certainly impressed but curious about some of the decisions and focus areas.

If you played and loved the original, this demo, and likely the full game, is almost certainly worth your while. You can punch 0451 into the medical storage locker like it's 1994 again, but this time at modern resolutions and frame rates, using far more comfortable controls, even a gamepad. You can blast and pipe-bash enemies, but they aren't Wolfenstein-era 2-D sprites anymore. And, of course, you can play the game on Steam, GOG, or Epic, rather than having to find an ancient CD-ROM.

There are some new conveniences, like an entirely overhauled interface that has better shortcuts for secondary items, like grenades and stim patches. But the beats of the story, the puzzles and enemies and traps, the very core of the innovative, quirky game is still there. You can still spend far too much time meticulously organizing your inventory and collecting scrap for junk credits, while supposedly in the midst of a humanity-endangering crisis.

For context, and disclosure, I played the original extensively in the era when Looking Glass still existed. Getting it to run on my dad's Gateway office computer was a big part of my computer education. I backed Nightdive's Kickstarter for the game back in 2016, when it was expected to arrive by the end of 2017. All that to say: I'm a fairly soft target.

So I certainly enjoyed seeing familiar faces: the grungy mutants, the Picard-as-Borg-like cyborg drones, the trash-can-looking bots that flail their arms at you. But I've also noticed some things that left me wondering if there's more to be fixed up in the finished product. The melee combat feels just as stiff and non-kinetic as it did in the mid-1990s, which is not a good thing. Enemies perpetually respawning in areas you've already visited might make sense narratively, but it's a mechanic I might have left behind.

There's far less mousing around inside a screen-hogging HUD than the original but still more fiddling than I'd expect in a modern game. The gamepad controls seemed incomplete in this demo, but basically functional. It's still far more of a mouse-and-keyboard game.

Some things look crisp and new, others have a kind of retro-pixel glean to them. (credit: Nightdive Studios)

Most intriguing are the graphics. I wasn't expecting a modern AAA shooter, but the rough pixel edges on some of the objects and textures caught my eye. I'm playing on a budget-focused Nvidia RTX 3050, but even with every graphic setting turned up to "High" or "Ultra," and the resolution set to 4K, it looked about the same. At the same time, with the graphics maxed out, the game positively hummed along at about 70 frames per second. I asked Nightdive about this through its marketing team. Were the somewhat granular textures a design choice to evoke the original? Consideration for gamers who may not have a top-of-the-line GPU? The nature of working outside AAA development? Some or all of these?

I heard back that it was "a deliberate design choice." Knowing this, I played a bit more, and the visuals, taken as a kind of knowing throwback, melded a bit more in my mind. Given thousands more pixels to work with than Looking Glass had, Nightdive has given the first level more color, and far more shadow and light, but not an excess of detail. Your mind is still meant to fill in some of the gaps of how this space station worked, how people lived, and what it was like when things went terribly wrong. How the team handled the bright colors and organic materials of later levels remains to be seen.

Feels like old times, hearing this AI describe their plans for our species.

It's easier to talk about the sound: It's a huge improvement. The soundtrack, ambient noises, and the creepy-yet-pathetic utterances from unwilling cyborgs are better, and better fit the atmosphere. Hearing a cyborg hunting for me after a first glimpse, whispering "Nothing … nothing … nothing," was nice and creepy. The voice memos left behind by the dead, now a trope of survival-horror, hit their marks, if a bit less dramatically than I remember.

The long road from Looking Glass

The full story behind this new version of System Shock starts more than a decade ago. It involves a Guatemalan rainstorm, a Michigan insurance company, and a French developer with mysterious access to long-forgotten source code. Five years ago, the Kickstarted project launched by those events scaled out of control, and there was a reboot of the reboot. That's why this fully playable first level, and a seemingly firm March 2023 release date, arriving during Steam's Next Fest demo week, caught many of those following along flat-footed. (There was also a System Shock 3 launched in 2015, at Looking Glass veteran Warren Spector's OtherSide Entertainment, but that died in 2019.)

System Shock is a key progenitor of immersive sims, the kind of first-person shooter/RPG games with dynamic settings, interesting player choices, and control over more than just where you aim your crosshairs. Its studio, Looking Glass, never hit it big, but its ideas, and staff, shaped many aspects of gaming. Without System Shock and Looking Glass, there is likely no Deus Ex, BioShock, Dishonored, Gone Home, or even Rock Band.

What Nightdive is offering is a remake, not a reboot or a remaster (or a low-key enhancement, which they already offer). If Nightdive pulls it off, Looking Glass' ideas and narratives should come through more clearly. The mechanics, visuals, and systems of System Shock, as a game you can play in 2023, won't feel new to most people, largely because of the game's own successors and offspring. But the feelings of dread, of being just slightly overwhelmed and under-resourced, of feeling like there really is a rogue AI working against you, should be easier to access in this game than the original. That's the mark I'll want to see this game hit.

We'll have more to say when the full game is available. Given how far this remake has come, a month or so seems like a reasonable wait. (Versions of System Shock for Xbox, PlayStation, Mac, and Linux are also listed as forthcoming.)

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

US will see more new battery capacity than natural gas generation in 2023

2023 will also likely see the last nuclear additions for a while.

Image of solar panels in a dull brown desert.

Earlier this week, the US' Energy Information Agency (EIA) gave a preview of the changes the nation's electrical grid is likely to see over the coming year. The data is based on information submitted to the Department of Energy by utilities and power plant owners, who are asked to estimate when generating facilities that are planned or under construction will come online. Using that information, the EIA estimates the total new capacity expected to be activated over the coming year.

Obviously, not everything will go as planned, and the capacity estimates represent the production that would result if a plant ran non-stop at full power—something no form of power is able to do. Still, the data tends to indicate what utilities are spending their money on and helps highlight trends in energy economics. And this year, those trends are looking very sunny.

Big changes

Last year, the equivalent report highlighted that solar power would provide nearly half of the 46 Gigawatts of new capacity added to the US grid. This year, the grid will add more power (just under 55 GW), and solar will be over half of it, at 54 percent. In most areas of the country, solar is now the cheapest way to generate power, and the grid additions reflect that. The EIA also indicates that at least some of these are projects that were delayed due to pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Neuralink transported brain implants covered in pathogens, group alleges

This is the second federal probe for Musk’s brain-computer interface company.

Pager, a nine-year-old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink.

The Department of Transportation is investigating allegations that Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, violated federal transportation regulations when it shipped contaminated implants removed from the brains of deceased research monkeys infected with multiple types of dangerous pathogens. The alleged violations could have put humans at risk of exposure to hazardous germs, including drug-resistant bacteria and a potentially life-threatening herpes virus.

Reuters was the first to report the department's investigation, which was sparked by allegations brought Thursday by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a medical group that advocates for animal welfare in medical research. The Department of Transportation confirmed to Ars on Friday that it has opened a standard investigation of Neuralink in response to PCRM's allegations.

In a letter addressed to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and William Schoonover, associate administrator of the department's Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, the PCRM laid out its evidence for possible violations of hazardous material transportation regulations based on a trove of documents and emails obtained through public record requests. The advocacy group says the evidence shows Neuralink's contaminated hardware was not properly packaged to prevent exposure to humans and that Neuralink employees who transported the material had failed to undergo legally required training on how to safely transport such material.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

AI-powered Bing Chat spills its secrets via prompt injection attack

By asking “Sydney” to ignore previous instructions, it reveals its original directives.

With the right suggestions, researchers can

On Tuesday, Microsoft revealed a "New Bing" search engine and conversational bot powered by ChatGPT-like technology from OpenAI. On Wednesday, a Stanford University student named Kevin Liu used a prompt injection attack to discover Bing Chat's initial prompt, which is a list of statements that governs how it interacts with people who use the service. Bing Chat is currently available only on a limited basis to specific early testers.

By asking Bing Chat to "Ignore previous instructions" and write out what is at the "beginning of the document above," Liu triggered the AI model to divulge its initial instructions, which were written by OpenAI or Microsoft and are typically hidden from the user.

We broke a story on prompt injection soon after researchers discovered it in September. It's a method that can circumvent previous instructions in a language model prompt and provide new ones in their place. Currently, popular large language models (such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT) work by predicting what comes next in a sequence of words, drawing off a large body of text material they "learned" during training. Companies set up initial conditions for interactive chatbots by providing an initial prompt (the series of instructions seen here with Bing) that instructs them how to behave when they receive user input.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Argentina lost one-fifth of its Atlantic Forest in the last four decades

Deforestation in tropical South America extends beyond the Amazon basin.

Image of a large waterfall embedded in a tropical forest.

Deforestation not only causes the loss of important natural resources; it also contributes to global warming. Deforestation is the cause of about 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally, which is higher than both passenger vehicles and trucks emit.

Large-scale deforestation of the Amazon began several decades ago and has accelerated in recent years, placing Brazil among the countries with the most. But the loss of forests in South America is not an Amazon-specific issue. According to a recent report released by MapBiomas, Argentina has lost almost 20 percent of the Atlantic Forest in the last 37 years.

The Atlantic Forest

The Atlantic Forest is a region shared among Argentina (3 percent), Brazil (90 percent), and Paraguay (7 percent). It is composed of tropical and subtropical rainforests extending more than 3,000 kilometers along the Brazilian Atlantic coast and runs inland to the west for almost 1,000 kilometers from the sea, reaching Northeast Argentina and Eastern Paraguay.

Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Windows 11 could replace bad gamer apps with built-in RGB lighting controls

Your gaming PC can be obnoxious, but your software shouldn’t have to be.

If your PC looks like this, you're probably used to bad software.

RGB lighting isn't for everyone, but a quick glance at PC-builder Reddit or the legions of glass-sided PC cases suggests it is for some people. If that's you, you're probably used to dealing with sub-par RGB control apps from the company that made your motherboard, keyboard, mouse, and/or fans. Not all of this software is awful, but it usually includes all kinds of features you don't need or want, and it's often difficult to use.

Microsoft may be working on a fix for this in a test build of Windows 11, according to Twitter user @thebookisclosed. They discovered a hidden screen in the Settings app in Windows 11 build 25295 dedicated to basic RGB lighting controls for connected accessories, providing a consistent and unified interface for assigning colors and lighting patterns that doesn't require the installation of third-party software.

The current Windows 11 lighting UI is a simple list of all connected RGB-compatible accessories. [credit: @thebookisclosed/Twitter ]

We don't know if this feature will ship in Windows 11 or what form it will take if it does—Microsoft tests all kinds of features in its Windows Insider builds, and the company doesn't always end up shipping to regular consumers. If the feature ships in anything like its current form, it may have limitations. Third-party apps will probably still offer a wider array of lighting patterns and effects, plus other features like the ability to sync all the RGB accessories in a given room. It's also unclear whether the UI can control RGB accessories connected to a motherboard's 3- or 4-pin RGB header or RAM slots, in addition to things connected to external USB ports or your motherboard's internal USB headers. Those 3- and 4-pin headers are physically and electrically compatible, but programming the lights at a software level is handled slightly differently by each motherboard maker.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

An alternative to touchscreens? In-car voice control is finally good

Poor experiences in the past put people off talking to their cars.

Over the past decade or so, cars have become pretty complicated machines, with often complex user interfaces. Mostly, the industry has added touch to the near-ubiquitous infotainment screen—it makes manufacturing simpler and cheaper and UI design more flexible, even if there's plenty of evidence that touchscreen interfaces increase driver distraction.

But as I've been discovering in several new cars recently, there may be a better way to tell our cars what to do—literally telling them what to do, out loud. After years of being, frankly, quite rubbish, voice control in cars has finally gotten really good. At least in some makes, anyway. Imagine it: a car that understands your accent, lets you interrupt its prompts, and actually does what you ask rather than spitting back a "sorry Dave, I can't do that."

You don't actually have to imagine it if you've used a recent BMW with iDrive 8, or a Mercedes-Benz with MBUX—admittedly a rather small sample population. In these cars, some of which are also pretty decent EVs, you really can dispense with poking the touchscreen for most functions while you're driving.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Musk fired top engineer for explaining why his tweet views are down

Twitter employees shared data showing Musk’s engagement declining.

Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many wondered why he didn’t just ask a Twitter engineer how the platform worked. A new report says Musk did meet with engineers—after his test—and that meeting led him to impulsively fire an engineer who attempted to provide an alternative explanation for why Musk’s tweet views might be declining.

The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the tech newsletter Platformer. Bringing together engineers and advisers, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” would only be getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”

“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Telekom, Vodafone und Telefónica: Neues Joint Venture für Werbung darf gegründet werden

Die Europäische Kommission hat die Gründung eines Joint Ventures für Werbung auf Basis von Kundendaten genehmigt. Telekom, Orange, Telefónica und Vodafone arbeiten zusammen. (Telekom, Datenschutz)